Today, when you say building something, it usually do not involve much materials like wood, acrylic or aluminum. Neither does it involve tools like drills or soldering irons. It usually involves only coding, on a computer. A website, a software, an app, as many would say and why not. Looking at what the world’s millionaires and billionaires made their fortune. They coded. Made Facebook and the likes, sold it and became crazy rich.

The joys of sawing and filing, drilling and milling, welding and hammering, were for a while lost in us. Until multicoptors came into out lives again.

It was awesome.

People gathered in forums, website and blogs about their built. Mixing and matching the electronics with plain old hands-on. Twisting metals, joining electronics and having lots of fun. Far from our live of pneumatics and hydraulics back in the day. One of us even though he’ll do pneumatics when he graduated.

It’s been around 2.5 weeks of non flying after crash03. The worse crash to date that broke the receiver module. Did manage to learn more about the receiver during these 2 weeks and tried out the FrSky and using traditional settings on the Naza.

Finally rebuilt and flying again. Here’s the flight without the gimbal and simply strapping the lipos to the legs.

Then the rebuild began.

Legs

Reused the legs after breaking it a few months ago. Ordered carbon fiber tubes, drilled 2 holes and replaced it. Used the DJI S800 rubber on these. Yes it adds weight but just look at it! It’s pretty! Will leave it on for now.

GPS/ Compass

To save cost, the Phantom came with a cheap looking compass that broke during crash03 and separated the compass that is installed on the landing gear. I replaced it with a single piece.

Motors

So what was Crash01 and 02? Let’s just say, it almost had me climbing trees.

At last, we’ve officially outgrown the Phantom. Built a F330, went looking for a F450, no stock and got a F550 instead.

Plotting over the Phantom’s Naza M V2 only requires getting the LED module and PMU. We’ve already replaced the GPS and Compass all in one module since a few crashes ago. The LED is USD $15.80 and PMU is around USD $66.50 on Ebay.

Thus, from Phantom to Naza M V2, GPS/Compass was USD $159.00 adding the LED and PMU = USD $241.30

It’s roughly the same as getting the boxed unit of the Naza M V2 which is around USD $300.00

After building the F330, the F550 will be familiar. There are already a lot of build videos on YouTube so we’ll only be posting pics.

VU

As we waited for the LED module, we had no way to configure the NazaMv2 for the F550 but we tried sticking it into the Naza M Lite we used for the F330 build and it works just as well.

Landing Gear

We plotted over the landing gear for a foldable quad that we got as spare.